ebooks

I’ve been working on a system-wide passive program for Teen Tech Week. Inspired by Nerd Craft Librarian, I came up with the BINGO card below.

The branch managers are all on board, so now I just need to come up with prizes. For completion prizes, I thought about candy or earbuds. For the grand prize, I want to put together a package of STEM fiction and some techy gifts (flash drive bracelet, etc…).

I’m also planning a retro gaming event for our main library. NES games (finger-crossed that I can find one!), older board games, and pogs. We’ll make some DIY pogs.

Made this graphic for the library’s teen social media accounts to help promote a curated ebook list. Really love how it turned out. What’s your go-to recommendation for John Green fans who have finished all of his work?

Spademan, the quippy garbageman-turned-hit man, is back in this sequel to Adam Sternbergh’s Shovel Ready. Near Enemy returns to a future New York City that has been ravaged by terrorist attacks. Most residents fled after the attacks and the ones who stayed escape through the limnosphere (aka “the limn”), a virtual reality where people can live out their fantasies. Everyone is safe in the limn, or so they thought. Terrorists have discovered a way to kill people in the limn, a feat believed to be impossible. Now it’s up to Spademan to save the city and protect his make-shift family….

Our OverDrive collection just added streaming video, like today. I created the graphic above and accompanying Tumblr post to promote it. I thought it would be a good idea to use the same color scheme as our OverDrive site and logo, so our regular patrons would recognize it easily.

Tomorrow is our system-wide in service day, which means I get to do staff training on digital resources. Everyone will be terribly bored, inattentive, and forget it all once they leave the building. NOT THIS TIME, BUDDY! No, sir.

This time, I have activities planned rather than a lecture and demonstration. My coworkers will be split into groups, given a list of tasks for each resource, and the group that completes the task first will get prizes. I want to make this as fun and relaxed as possible. We did a little bit of hands-on stuff at the last in-service for the main branch, but it will be all hands-on this time. Also, it will be the first time that I’m in charge of the training solo. We’re going to cover: OverDrive, Zinio Digital Magazines, NoveList, Freegal Music & Freegal Movies, and our Boopsie app. Everyone is required to bring a device with them (if they have one) and we will have the library’s devices on hand. I’m hoping that once the staff actually uses our services, they will promote them better. (It blows my mind that some of them have never used our services. One person has worked here for at least 5 years and didn’t even have a library card.)

If you would like to, take a look at the activity sheet. Any input or tips are greatly appreciated. I’m always looking to improve my training skills.

Back in February, I posted about a Facebook promotion I was trying out – Blind Date with an eBook. I created images with three-word ebook description using Picmonkey, then posted the photos with an accompanying shortlink. This meant that our Facebook fans would have to actually click the link to find out what ebook was described, making it a Blind Date. I was inspired by all the Blind Date with a Book displays popping up in brick and mortar libraries. Now that the promotion is over, here are some insights:

An average of 30 people saw each post, that’s approximately 33% of our 91 Facebook fans. I think that Facebook’s recent changes had a lot to do with that.

20 out of the 28 ebooks featured were checked out during the time of the promotion (February 1-28). A handful were checked out multiple times. I was pleasantly surprised by this figure considering the low number of people who actually saw the posts.

Almost all likes, shares, and comments on the Blind Date posts were by other librarians or library pages. This was disappointing to me. I had hoped to garner more attention from our actual, everyday users. However, I’m very glad that fellow librarians liked the idea. In fact, another West Virginia library adapted it for their own social media accounts.

Titles selected were a mix of popular ebooks that our patrons seemed to have missed and ebooks that I thought our patrons would enjoy based on what they were already checking out.

Despite the fact that this promotion didn’t quite meet my expectations, I will try it again next year. I think when we have a larger fan base, it will work better. I may expand it to other social media platforms. This could work really well on Pinterest and Twitter.